When using a circular approach, designers try to re-think products and consumption patterns from scratch. Thus, this circular design can bring up very innovative products and new concepts for business models (for example ‘sharing instead of owning’, ‘service as a product’).

Even if these circular business models might seem promising from the very beginning, the road from the first idea to the ready and marketable product can be often long and burdensome. One major challenge is the difficulty of accessing finance, especially for small and medium sized enterprises and startups.  

Crowdfunding could be therefore an alternative to the conventional opportunities to finance circular business models. In crowdfunding, a large number of people – the crowd – funds a project or a venture with many small amounts of money. That is why MOVECO invited CrowdStream to its partner meeting in Osijek (Croatia) on December 6, 2017 in order to create synergies between the two projects.

The Interreg project CrowdStream, like MOVECO funded by the Danube Transnational Programme, is working on improving the cooperation between business support organisations and enterprises to guarantee a qualitative access to crowdfunding.

On December 6, 2017, CrowdStream partner ConPlusUltra from Vienna (Austria) visited MOVECO and was giving insights in crowdfunding. ConPlusUltra introduced the MOVECO consortium to the topic of crowdfunding and showed examples from each country of the CrowdStream partnership. In this way, a wide range of crowdfunding finance opportunities were presented. On their website you can find different regional market analyis and country profiles from various countries in the Danube region. To learn more, please click here.

In the afternoon, the CrowdStream representative participated in MOVECO’s first public Stakeholder Forum, where different workshops discussed perspectives of circular economy in the Danube region.

Thank you CrowdStream for your visit! We wish CrowdStream good continuation and a Prosperous New Year 2018 with lots of success!

Copyright photos: CrowdStream

For more information about CrowdStream, please visit their website and follow them on Facebook.

For more information about MOVECO, we invite you to visit our website and follow us on social media.

If you want to share your thoughts about circular economy or if you are interested in receiving the MOVECO newsletter twice a year, let us know and send an email to moveco@bayfor.org.  

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(Photo credits: MOVECO project)